


29/01

by TeaCub90



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship/Love, Gen, John Watson Takes Care of Sherlock Holmes, Post-Season/Series 04, Reflection, Ten Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-19 02:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22470274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaCub90/pseuds/TeaCub90
Summary: Sherlock is falling asleep in his chair.
Relationships: John Watson & Rosamund Mary "Rosie" Watson, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Kudos: 49





	29/01

**Author's Note:**

> I've lost my way in this fandom a little over the years, on and off, but I couldn't resist writing something for the boys' tenth year anniversary. It's been a hell of a ride.  
> Contains: fluffy affectionate gestures, John being reflective, some swearing, mentions of both Brexit and past suicidal thoughts, and Rosie being wise.

* * *

Sherlock is falling asleep in his chair. The telly is on and so is the fire and Sherlock’s head is nodding backwards and forwards, his eyelashes fluttering, tapdancing on the line between wakefulness and sleep; that weird kind of line that makes the world go fuzzy and makes the scenes on television feel like something out of a dream. Unsurprising, really; on a cold night like this one, the heating is cranked up high and the flames in the grate are crackling, soothing. 

And Sherlock Holmes is tired.

John watches him – pretends to be reading the magazine he’s picked up at random, an article on Brexit; dear God, how the world has changed – but really, peeks at him over the top, unable to focus on the words for too long. Not that he’d want to; it’s a depressing-as fuck article. And he thought there were problems enough in the world when he and Sherlock first met, he thinks with disgust, whacking the magazine aside with more force than intended. Hard to believe, looking back, him with a cane and hair the same dull colour as the bags beneath his eyes, but the world seemed younger, somehow, then; he and Sherlock made much more communication on their laptops than on their phones and DVDs were popular; you didn’t have to stream or download every last little fucking thing. For crying out loud, HMV was _thriving_ , John nipping in every other week to find yet another film to torment Sherlock with, an attempt to familiarise him with popular culture.

He frowns at his hands, joined together across his stomach, cross with these thoughts and how annoyed they make him feel; glances back at Sherlock, resting his head on one hand, rubbing at the corner of his eye and immediately softens. Three days, this case kept him going; John had entertained the thought of making the night special, the date of the 29th always lodged somewhere in the back of his brain as being important, somehow. Perhaps a shadow of memory from his blog, the number carried with him over the years; 29/01. The day when things started to happen to him, again.

In the two years after Bart’s, the memory of that number had hurt like hell. But then many things hurt like hell; everything in his life seemed to be ablaze somehow, the news that Sherlock was alive tugging him by the hand and pulling him along behind as ever, expecting to somehow relive those glory days from years lost, years that felt more and more, as time went on, as though they’d disappeared into the night after donning their coats and thanking the host for a good party, only for the occasion to somehow fall apart without them. Throwing his best friend and his wife-to-be together, feeling frankly bloody relieved when they smiled at each other and meant it, and feeling as though finally, finally, life could settle, and he could take everything at face value.

But then he couldn’t, and everything went a) mad; b) to hell and c) to hell, madly so. _Badly_ so.

Mary did a terrible thing to Sherlock. Sherlock did terrible things in front of John and for John, to keep Mary safe. John did terrible things, full-stop.

He stares into the fire like the proverbial tragic hero in any old-fashioned Victorian story (not the hero. Only one of the people in this room is a hero, and it’s certainly not him) and watches it all again, like he can’t help but do sometimes. The sheer nerve of them, this maniacal little duo that became a trio and then back again, that went around in a circle, stumbling John through an honourable, unwanted discharge; a sudden liveliness that became a life; a grief so heavy it bled into his bones; falling in love; an unexpected reunion and a marriage, a baby and a dragged attempt through suburban living with the new nursery and the pram in the hallway. His ex-assassin wife’s past finally catching up with her; the shoe finally dropping.

 _Never had anything to do with you in the end,_ John thinks, looking at Sherlock, sleepy and vulnerable, at Mary’s photo grinning down above the mantlepiece. _Not her, at least. She had her own tale to tell._ He’s just glad that she left it behind in the hands of the right people, in the end. Who else, after all, could find the stories in the webbing of the woman who called herself Mary Watson? Who else indeed but Sherlock Holmes, who looked past the bullet in his own chest and into the heart beating, steadfast and determined, within Mary’s own.

And it all started with the 29th, he thinks; marvels really, watching the flames, watching the way they add gold manner to Sherlock’s face, lend youth to the expression of a man whom he once considered a strange child, who once sat in this very room, a long time ago and told him sharply and sternly – and with disappointment like a knife in his tone, as though he were a resigned schoolmaster with an obstinate child – _don’t make people into heroes,_ regardless of the fact that his own crooked finger, his sharp, expectant beckoning of him into his life - _if inconvenient, come anyway -_ had saved John’s own.

They’ve never spoken about it. Not outright. John wonders if they even should; if they ever will.

He’d had an idea tonight, he’d had this vague idea of – he doesn’t know, really – recreating it all. Asking Mrs Hudson to babysit Rosie and take Sherlock out to Angelo’s, sit in the table by the window, watch the traffic and just talk, reminisce. But Sherlock had been ready to drop upon catching the garrotting, adulterous uncle and handed him over to Lestrade before falling down into his chair and staying there and Mrs Hudson – a little frailer, a little thinner, a little older than she was the day she turned to John with a twinkle in his eye and asked about two bedrooms – was visiting her sister for the day and Rosie was being clingy, wanted to play in the living-room. The meal had become a takeaway – a lasagne for Sherlock, spaghetti for Rosie and John and Sherlock could barely eat, drooping his head into the plate while Rosie was determined to turn her spaghetti strands into a wig, beaming at her father’s exasperation.

 _Who the hell were you kidding, anyway?_ John chides himself. _Clean slate? Putting a massive, sheet of paper over the past? You’d never be able to smooth it down. All the lumps you’ve given each other over the years, they’d still be seen underneath. You twat._

‘Daddy’s a silly girl, Rosie,’ he had lamented earlier, as he had put his daughter to bed with surprisingly less fuss than usual, so that had been something, at least. Rosie, in all her two-and-a-half-year-old wisdom, had considered this seriously before standing up in her cot and taking her father’s face between his hands, bestowing a surprise kiss upon him.

‘You _silly,_ daddy,’ she had agreed, and John managed a grin from between her palms, clenched together as his cheeks were. ‘But you not _bad_ daddy,’ she had added, her smile melting away into something serious as she shook her head and then she smacked both hands against his cheeks - ‘Ow, ow, gently, darling’ - and gave him another kiss for luck. ‘You _good_ daddy!’

John, not knowing what else to say, had scooped her up for a cuddle and left it there; felt an odd mixture of sudden loneliness and something else, something that brought a lump to his throat and told him he wasn’t as alone as he felt. Rosie had gone right off to sleep after that, daughterly duty apparently done, and John had been left to his thoughts in an uncharacteristically quiet flat, as though some space had been carved out for him to sit and think.

Is this how Sherlock’s felt in here in the past, alone for days on end, with nothing and nobody to distract him, his thoughts his only coat of company? As though he’s floating in the gaps between time, between minutes, even, wondering what’s around the corner? What it might do to you?

‘Come on,’ he says aloud and his voice seems to shock both of them out of the spell that’s fallen over 221b like a cloak at the end of winter; Sherlock, head lolling, snaps to attention, wavers, opening his eyes and blinking up. John hums to watch him; stands and offers his hand. 

‘I’ll take you to bed,’ he volunteers; only belatedly realising, with a slight cringe, just how that sounded,, but Sherlock doesn’t seem to mind; lets himself be hauled sleepily to his feet and held close, one of John’s arms around his waist as he navigates him down the hallway to his room, murmuring bits of nonsense.

He drops onto the bed as soon as he steps into his room, blinking, uncomprehending and offended, at the light as John turns on the lamp. He falls backwards, waves a hand around in vague dismissal and John chuckles despite himself, remembering those first gunshots in the wall, the first time he walked out after having his writing and intelligence insulted with a flick of the fingers.

‘Come on,’ he pulls him up again. ‘Can’t go to bed like that, let me help you.’

‘Hm,’ Sherlock grunts and lets John undress him, sits and watches, almost detached. Attempts to help wriggle off his trousers and winds up lying across the bed, utterly defeated, with them halfway down his knees, his pants mercifully still on. John shakes his head, fighting a smile as he leans over him. A ghost of a smile flits over Sherlock’s mouth in return as they stare at each other, the light from the lamp a bridge between them, and it feels much like an insult, _you’re an idiot,_ wrapped up in an invitation to dinner among the sirens.

It also feels a lot like trust. 

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ John says after a beat, lets his smile loose as he sets to work putting Sherlock to rights. ‘You’re ridiculous.’ He shoves a pyjama top over his head, watches him climb haphazardly under the duvet. ‘You’ve always been ridiculous,’ he mutters, propping the blankets up over him, tucking them around him. Any early impression he’d had of the other man’s sleeping-habits – pliant and angelic, if he ever slept at all – was immediately dispelled by the state of him after the Irene Adler case, or the first half, at least; slumped in bed, sleepy and slurring, all posh propriety disappeared.

When nothing else seems forthcoming, he places a hand on his shoulder.

‘Right. Goodnight, then.’

A grunt emerges in the form of some semblance words from the pillow; he pauses, halfway to his feet.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ll still be here in the morning, won’t you?’ Sherlock lifts his head a little to ask the question more clearly, attempting to look over his shoulder. ‘Only, you might _not_ be.’ He’s slurred, distressed; dreaming, maybe, confused. His brain does things to him when he’s tired, even after all this time and it takes John a minute to catch up.

‘Of _course_ I’ll still be here, mate.’ He tugs the duvet back over Sherlock, quietly exasperated, rubs his hair; watches him for a moment, huddled beneath the blankets like a boy, pained by his own exhaustion. He seems blunter now, softer; tamed by age and hurts that John still doesn’t fully understand and some of which he’s responsible for, and the inconvenience of having to consider other people’s feelings every now and then.

He seemed so… _untouchable_ when John first met him. So innocent and yet so large; so singular and yet strangely charming. Friendly enough, if you squinted _hard;_ the first person not to require an explanation for why John Watson was fading, instead simply providing it, along with zero judgement and what turned out to be the antidote.

‘I’ll be here,’ he promises again, adjusts the blankets restlessly before leaning in to press a firm kiss to that dark temple, another needless stroke of the hair. ‘I’m right here, Sherlock. Okay?’ He whispers the words into his ear, presses his forehead briefly against Sherlock’s blanketed shoulder. ‘I’m here.’ Because he is – because John Watson did _not,_ after all, complete the schedule roster of remaining days he gave himself to live before taking matters into his own hands and his gun out of that bedsit drawer for the final time; did _not_ get shot by some vicious, anonymous hitman while desperately trying to talk Sherlock down from Barts' bloody roof; did not always a good husband make, but had time enough brought for himself and for Mary, at the very least, so that their daughter could be born.

Better to lay good things at Sherlock Holmes’ feet for a change – if the survival of a soldier can necessarily be considered good, in any sense of the word. John likes to think so.

‘I’m here,’ he says again, aware that in regular circumstances Sherlock would, by now, be rolling his eyes at the repetition, _change the record, John, this is getting dull._ ‘Because of you.’

Gentle snores are his own response, the blanket lifting with the effort, but it’s a definite step-up from saying these things too late to a cold, marble grave. John lingers, listens to the sound of that breathing; Sherlock Holmes, who appears in the papers as untouchable, unsolvable, the Clever Detective in the Funny Hat who breaks the hearts of secretaries everywhere – and that of a doctor or two, every now and again and _certainly_ if he jumps off another building – worn out from the world after saving another life within it.

‘See you in the morning,’ he murmurs finally, pressing another kiss to those curls before pushing himself up and out of the room; turns out the lights, puts the grate in front of the dimming fire and leaving it to burn itself out, makes a mental note to call Mike for a pint, and shuffles upstairs to bed.

*


End file.
